A "Typical" ROBLOX Hacker - How a Life was Ended
This is not your typical story about anonymous users killing through a computer screen. At no point will I mention some infamous hacker and their blood-ridden ROBLOX places with models of dead and deceased avatars of admins. A hacker is a hacker, those who inject malicious scripts and bring servers to their knees, not someone whom is able to kill someone in real life. Yet, in this case, both of those roles are prominent. Prominent in my case of my game being hacked overnight. What followed subsequently still defies my previous standing knowledge of what a ROBLOX hacker was. Summer has begun for most of the youth around the world. Children are eagerly getting on ROBLOX more frequently to indulge in the joy of the front page games. Games created by talented individuals, sometimes a whole group of seasoned developers. I was once a seasoned developer. I considered myself the elite of ROBLOX's community. I could code in C++ and Lua like a champ, I made thousands of Robux every week, and a had an abundance of friends to support me. They helped me co-manage my most prized and beloved project at the time. It was my ROBLOX game. My ROBLOX game was a very well-received collection of hundreds of various minigames. Stuff along the lines of Murder Mystery, sword fighting, gun fights, all the variety my and my dev team could muster. We spent hours on each individual game making sure every little detail was perfected. After months of developing and advertising the game as our first release, we were in turn rewarded with the honor of our game plastered on the front page after just a few weeks. In summary, our craft was a powerhouse of a game, sweeping millions of players over it's life cycle. My dev team consisted of longtime ROBLOX friends and veterans, people who I've been acquainted with for years. I won't mention their usernames for the sake of disclosure. Their accounts have been inactive for months, anyway. There's no bother in me mentioning my game's name, or more of what my game's name was. The page is corrupted, for reasons I'll explain later. The game is no longer active not due to me deactivating it, but by a more conspicuous force. Not the conventional archetype of the force, the kind that only injects minor scripts such as the ability to modify the skybox decal, play music ID's, or godmode. This was a more significant force. A force that likely had the ability to kill an entire server of players, steal their creator's items, and leave a path of malice in their wake. The path of a hacker. As aforementioned, me and my dev team racked up thousands of Robux weekly through the purchasing of gamepasses and donations. The Robux we obtained from that was then exchanged for U.S. Dollars via DevEx. I had made so much Robux that I could start making a living off of my game. After that, I had basically been living off my game for real income. I bought my food, clothes, and rent all with that cash. I reminisce the days in which me and my friends would gather online and tuck in to a night of hanging out, messing around on various ROBLOX games, laughing our asses off as we tossed jokes and humorous stories regarding what went down in our lives. I'd get off "work" early in the evening, excited to join my friends who were all waiting eagerly for me. We would adorn our avatar with crazy and expensive hats before joining a random server of our game, surprising the lucky ones that recognized us as the developers of the game. I'd stay up til early next morning, tired in contrast to those I was playing with, who all lived in different time zones. Those long, sleepless nights were my rock. All the memories I made with my friends in those days. They were all so special to me. As obnoxious and carefree as we would act, I was still sure myself and all my friends felt the same mutual feeling of a strong friendship. Those nights were our way of bonding. I still often had matters to tend to in real life, but I'd often set them aside just to hang out with those I care about. As unlikely as I deemed it, one of those many nights would be much more different. The odd one out. The night where it all started. It was a hot Saturday evening. Me and my friends had set aside tonight, the first night of summer, to have one of our longest gaming sessions. We started only at about 5 P.M., about the time in which we got off work to indulge in an endless night of gaming. We wanted to make that night special because our game had just surpassed 100 million visits. We had updated our game's lobby with festive decorations beforehand for the occasion, both by the themes of a large milestone and the beginning of summer. We heavily advertised the new update as a big celebration for our game. We even sent out PM invitations to some ROBLOX admins hoping they'd find time to celebrate with us. We added several new minigames and were even sponsored by ROBLOX, which included an exclusive hat that players could earn by earning a badge. That badge in question was received by getting through a rotation all of the minigames we had added without losing or dying. It was undoubtedly a prize to be taken pride with, only won by 0.0001% of players. The hat was a colorful top hat with several crazy patterns and designs, but the team thought it was perfect to represent our masterpiece of a game. As the event approached, we had temporarily closed the game to make final adjustments prior to our update. Everything was set in place, ready to make an eternal mark on ROBLOX's history. We adorned our avatars with crazy and expensive combinations of shirts, hats, and gear. We were finalizing all of our changes whilst streaming on Twitch to some 1,000 viewers. It was quite incredible considering ROBLOX's meager reputation on Twitch. With the excitement that ran through me and thousands of others, I had finally finished the changes, joined the game, and waited eagerly for others. Players began to spawn in, each walking around taking in the bright adornments we had installed in the lobby. Before they could fully scan the entire place, they noticed me and my friends in a group. People began to gather around and go crazy in the chat, knowing they were the lucky people to get us in their server. Just as our server of almost 50 people began to start, moderators such as MrDoomBringer and Telamon joined to my surprise. They both seemed very impressed by the summer celebration aesthetic of the game, both congratulating me and my team of our accomplishments. Speaking of my team, we were all in a Discord chat, squealing and yelling like madmen at the site of moderators. We had an entourage of some 40 or 50 users vigorously jumping around us like bees. Just as the maximum amount of players joined, the minigames began to start. Once everyone began to get used to the presence of the development team and the moderators, we began with more simplistic, arcade-style minigames like Laser Tag or Freeze Tag. The sounds of my friends shouting at each other and throwing out various callouts during gameplay was what got my adrenaline going. My friends were indeed masters of their own craft, able to kill players with their guns from incredible distances. I wasn't the best that day, because my mind was only focused on all the players and moderators interacting, going crazy in the chat and making conversation. It reminded me of how proud I was of the world I crafted, one of ROBLOX's biggest junctions for having innocent fun and going wild. As we spawned in to a game of Paintball, my friends as well as people in our team chat began to throw out callouts and various strategies that in my opinion, didn't seem fit for a casual game of Paintball. To my luck, strategy was quickly thrown out the window as crowds of players in either red or blue outfits began spraying digital paint on each other. That was what I liked seeing most watching from afar on the map as a sniper. People having fun. We were roughly on the 80th minigame in the rotation, in which more people began to leave and the party seemed to die down a bit. My friends and I were out of breath from the yelling and shouting we had done. Players seemed dramatically less wild since they were now fully used to the presence of us. It was now 1:00 A.M., most players left by then, assuming they were youth. Quite quickly in fact, everyone except me, my friends, and the 2 moderators were on the server. We decided to temporarily private the server to have some goodbyes for the night. The moderators congratulated us on our milestone and our creation of such an amazing game before leaving the server. It was now just me and my friends, who decided to get off and go to sleep, most of them had real morning shifts. Before leaving, they actually threw out some more sentimental words to me, saying how proud they were of me and my skills as a developer. It made me feel incredibly elated to hear those words from my closest peers, but I thanked them. After that, the Discord chat was subsequently disbanded after our parting words for the night. I was the only one left on the game, on the entirety of all the servers since I had decided to lock it for the night just to take in my own creation undisturbed. I was alone. I moved my character around the lobby, looking at a virtual museum we had built off to the side of all of our accomplishments. I analyzed a few pictures, which were just decals of screenshots consisting of me, my friends, and a bunch of other random important users, all a blur to me. There was a frame over the screenshot, one that read the game's name and the year 2011 at the bottom. There were more framed screenshots along the first one, the only differences being the year, our outfits, and the amount of people crowding around us. Every year, the amount of people we had in one of those pictures seemed to multiply. The lobby felt undisturbed an eerie without the presence of users to fill it. I was the only one online, the creator. I decided to see how much exact visits we had surpassed, to I minimized my game and opened a new tab to check my game's statistics. I saw that we had surpassed 100 million visits, with about a thousand more adding with it. After that, I let my eyes wander around aimlessly across the page, just taking in all of our other milestones. By coincidence, my eyes met with the number describing how many players were on the server in real time. My eyes seem to move slower and more dreary as I finally checked the amount. Expecting the expected, my eyes began to widen very slowly as I read "2 players." I didn't bother to take my discovery with an attitude. It was probably just some sort of glitch. I decided to take action and go back to my game and check the player roster. I was sure that no other username would read except for mine, it just wasn't plausible. As I opened up the alternate window, I was still in the museum wing. I moved my eyes to scan the mysterious entity that had joined my server. My mind seemed to be in confusion as I saw that the user's name was this random jumble of letters and characters, as if it was a chunk of code. The username also surpassed the allowed length of a ROBLOX username by a longshot. There were letters going off my screen. However, no character had spawned in, as if the user was connecting with some sort of modem. I didn't know what I expected. The presence of some mysterious user seemed to make my mind go numb. I tried to obscure myself in the museum by positioning my character away from the entrance, but I still had a view of the spawn to witness any incoming user. After about 30 seconds, I began to lose hope and want to leave. Just as I was about to leave the server, my monitor went black. It was not turned off, however. It was still displaying color, but that color was just black. After just a few seconds, the monitor flashed back to life, displaying the same area I was in the museum just a few seconds ago. Everything was the same, my monitor was fine, but there was one minor difference. A mysterious user wearing what appeared to be the old starter outfit, with the Bloxxer T-shirt and cap was spawned. At first, the mysterious figure didn't move for a while. He didn't say anything or look anywhere in my direction. I began to feel sick inside my stomach. Finally, the character moved a few studs directly forward in an eerie fashion. They looked around at the scenery blankly as if to mock it. After they moved around aimlessly, they began to notice my character. I felt myself ache a bit at the sight of their blank default smile face staring in my direction. As the intruder approached, my character was still until he finally was within my proximity. He then equipped some sort of tool, yet it was invisible. This made his hand rotate 45 degrees to face my character, as if he was about to touch me with some sort of invisible weapon. As he finally got closer, his hand made contact with my hitbox. My screen went black once again, this time as if it was completely turned off. The LEDs on my computer began to dim and eventually turn off completely as if my system overvolted. I began to mash my computer's power button multiple times, only to be met with no distinct sound or display on my monitor. I slumped back deep in my chair, knowing now the being I had encountered. I was not dealing with an ordinary user whom was part of the bright and cheerful community that was ROBLOX. I was not dealing with some sort of prankster who knew a few tricks on how to exploit the code of a ROBLOX game. I was dealing with a hacker. It was obvious accessing ROBLOX from my PC was a bust, but I had another idea. I knew I had the ROBLOX app installed on my tablet, for those times I needed to read through the hundreds of messages I got from fans on the go. My tablet was laying stationary on my bed across from my computer. I felt the compelling feeling of hope as I thought that my answers to this tomfoolery would lie in my tablet. I held down the power button for a few seconds before being welcomed with the Apple logo. I swiped some times left to navigate to the friendly domain of the ROBLOX app. As I repeatedly tapped the app, I was periodically welcomed by the red "R" in front of a white background. But nothing would change. It seemed as if my tablet was locked in a way in which it only displayed a still of the startup screen. I could feel my tablet grow hot threw it's protective aluminum shell, as if me simply pressing one button overwhelmed the CPU with intense heat. It was as if my tablet was immensely struggling to open ROBLOX. I was determined to open up ROBLOX, even if it resulted in the killing of my tablet. I wanted to figure out what was going on. Finally after what seemed like forever, I was greeted with my profile. But things had changed. Everything seemed relatively similar. I still had my wacky combo of various hats, but the package I had equipped was gone, replaced with the standard block shape. Everything was unchanged, but I seemed to notice something on my character. The picture of my character off to the side's seemed to flicker between a version of it with and without the package, as my tablet was relentlessly fighting against this other force to preserve my avatar. The flickering seemed to slow down after a while, in which now the variation without the package was taking over most of the refresh rate. The flickering was now reduced to a halt, only occasionally bothering to show how my profile once was. Some empty spaces were replaced with different colored pixels, vomit-inducing shades of neon red and green, in which different pixels periodically disappeared and reappeared. Finally, my avatar was left as the default package, but still retaining my shirt, pants, and hats. I half smiled at the relief at the majority of my items being safe, but my mind was still in a contracting state as I reckoned with this entity. I wasn't sure what to do or think, but that was when my tablet seemed to become an internal volcano of heat. My hand quickly began to sting, which left me dropping the tablet on accident on my bed. My tablet subsequently died instantly. As aggravated as I was, there's was nothing I could do. I was left to sleep that endless, late night that was previously filled with hundreds of laughs and friendly faces. I was now all alone in this. Before I could continue to wrap my head around my situation, I felt my eyes drop aimlessly into a solitude of disturbance and dread for the coming morning. The next morning, 8:12 A.M. My eyes succumb to the absence of any electric light in my bedroom. I feel my eyelids lift in worry as I know exactly what's on my mind. I lift myself out of bed in a confused, broken fashion as my stomach still tingles with partial sickness from what I had experienced the night before. I look around my room slowly as if to bear myself with what I had been stuck with for 4 years, ever since I got out of school, despite how familiar I was with my domain. Right when I was about to glance to my computer, I heard the light mechanical sound of the fans whirring. I soon caught a flashing white LED in the corner of my eye. My computer was already on, with the monitor displaying a broken, corrupt variation of ROBLOX's usually friendly and colorful homescreen. Amalgamation. That was the first word to hit my mind when I found the homepage broken with choppy lines of code, violent neon colors taking up large portions of the screen, and a command prompt open. The prompt flickered blankly for a few seconds before suddenly displaying a jumble of white lettering running across the screen. A wall of white text, which didn't really help the fact that I was squinting to view the text which made my eyes sting. I, however, caught very loose words and phrases. "Account accessed." "Scanning user." "Reading cache." Those phrases were spaced out and jumbled with numbers and other code I didn't catch. But I did recognize a few lines that were crucial to my understanding of what was happening. It gave me acute insight on the intentions of my mutual fiend. I'll continue to read out the text in it's most authentic coded form. "user_item:ID:72082328:_red_sparkle_time_fedora located. Entity extraction beginning..." I knew what was happening in an instant. I knew what was happening, but in my mind I felt nothing. I saw those words for a while before the system continued to extract other things. I felt like my mind should've instantly began searching for solutions, but I was distraught. My eyes wandered blankly up and down. Was this planned? Why on that day? How could I be this huge target for such a ferocity? Instead of thinking of ways to stop this malice, I began to contemplate what had happened to me in the past hours. I had to come to terms eventually. My account was hacked with all of its contents being stolen digitally in the blink of an eye. Every last badge, item, and game. 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